Our current ‘Gothic Great’ – Edgar Allan Poe.

We love the arrival of Poe’s narrator at the House of Usher, where he ‘looked upon the scene… upon the bleak walls – upon the vacant eye-like windows… with an utter depression of soul…’ with ‘an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart’.

So much in here that is wonderfully, gloomily Gothic: those pre-modifiers ‘bleak’; ‘vacant, eye-like’; the intensifier ‘utter’. The triplets ‘iciness’, ‘sinking’ ‘sickening of the heart’ that emphasise and anticipate the diseased mind and bodily death that is to come; the sibilance that settles around us, wraps our own hearts in ice.

 American Gothic at its best, perhaps, where we are into a more psychologically complex rendering of the genre. What is different about this crumbling old house from those earlier Gothic spaces of, say, Ann Radcliffe’s? Well here, we are treated to a house with a malevolence of its own. ‘Not so much haunted, as haunting its own inhabitants’ (Sue Chaplin). 

Read and be thrilled!

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839)